Over the past five years, the Gene Siskel Film Center’s European Union Film Festival has programmed the likes of Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, Bruno Dumont’s Li’l Quinquin, Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat, Terrence Davis’ Sunset Song, and Oliver Assayas’ Personal Shopper. It’s an indispensable film education, with the Siskel Center’s programming team ambitiously taking on the kind of films that rarely screen on more than a half-dozen screens in the city (if at all).

Less commercially inclined than their Chicago International Film Festival counterpart, I frequently considered the Chicago European Union Film Festival to be the city’s true cinephile attraction; the kind of festival that remedies CIFF’s glaring omissions and bloated filler selections. With such inclusions as Arnaud Desplechin’s Ismael’s Ghostd, Bruno Dumont’s Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc, Kornel Mundruczo’s Jupiter’s Moon, and Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, this year’s European Union Film Festival offers Chicago’s cinephiles with an all too rare opportunity to catch up with some of Europe’s most dynamic films, all within the comforts of the Siskel Center’s renovated theaters. Given how barren the winter movie months can become, the European Union Film Festival emerges as a cinephile’s oasis.